Since Postgres 9.6 back in 2016, each new major release of Postgres has arrived in late September or early October, and now Postgres 15 (Postgres's 32nd major release overall) is with us after the usual round of beta and RC releases.

In coming weeks, Postgres Weekly will continue to feature blog posts about what's changed, performance benchmarks, and similar developments, but for now, what's new?

• SQL MERGE – a long time coming – for conditionally modifying, inserting or deleting rows in a single statement.

• LZ4 and Zstandard (zstd) compression fupport for WAL files.

• Server-side compression of backups using gzip, LZ4 or zstd with pg_basebackup.

• New regular expression functions for inspecting strings including regexp_count and regexp_like.

• 'Security invoker' views can query data using the permissions of the caller of the view rather than the creator of the view – a key data security feature.

• A new jsonlog logging format which, unsurprisingly, logs using a defined JSON structure.

• A new pg_walinspect extension opens the possiblity to query write-ahead logs through SQL rather than separate tooling.

• Faster sort performance overall.

• Users can now be granted permission to alter certain server-level config params.

• Improved logical replication features.

Of course, there's more and for that you'll want to check out the official release notes as they provide the most exhaustive guide to changes and new features.

Note: This is only a Postgres 15 release 'newsflash' issue of Postgres Weekly. For the latest full issue, refer to yesterday's issue – issue #475.